1966 | ‘The Time Has Come for Action’

After a heavily armed sniper killed more than a dozen people and wounded twice as many more by firing from a tower at the University of Texas, the president of the United States offered his thoughts and prayers to the victims’ relatives, including an executive at a company the president owned.

Then, without waiting any longer, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a response to match the deadly event.

“What happened is not without a lesson: that we must press urgently for the legislation now pending in Congress to help prevent the wrong person from obtaining firearms,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement read by Bill Moyers, the White House press secretary, on Aug. 2, 1966. That was one day after the shootings in Austin.

“The bill would not prevent all such tragedies,” the statement continued. “But it would help reduce the unrestricted sale of firearms to those who cannot be trusted in their use and possession. How many lives might be saved as a consequence?

“The gun control bill has been under consideration in the Congress for many months. The time has come for action.”

Karen Griffith, 17, died of her wounds a week later. David Hubert Gunby, 23, died in 2001 of kidney disease attributable to the wound he suffered in 1966, and his death was ruled a homicide. Because Mr. Whitman had earlier killed his mother, Margaret, 43, and his wife, Kathleen, 23, the day’s death toll is often placed at 17.

“We are deeply grieved,” Mr. Johnson was quoted as saying by Robert B. Semple Jr., a correspondent who was covering the president for The New York Times, alongside Charles Mohr.

Today, Mr. Semple is the associate editor of the editorial page. In between, he has been the chief White House correspondent, the deputy national editor, the London bureau chief, the foreign editor and the editor of the Op-Ed Page. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his editorials on environmental issues.

Immediately after the Austin killings, Mr. Semple wrote that Washington insiders were “cautious about predicting final success for a gun control bill.”

“They recalled that after the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, there was a strong drive for passage for restrictive measures. However, the drive collapsed before the powerful opposition of the National Rifle Association and other gun clubs.”

Mr. Johnson signed the legislation under protest that it did not go far enough in controlling gun ownership.

“The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation,” the president said Oct. 22, 1968. “They were the voices of a powerful gun lobby that has prevailed for the moment in an election year.”

“We have been through a great deal of anguish these last few months and these last few years — too much anguish to forget so quickly,” Mr. Johnson said.

It would take 16 years for the record one-day toll by a lone gunman to fall. On July 18, 1984, James Huberty killed 21 people and injured 19 at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, Calif.